Connecting You to Success

November 19, 2007

Connecting Real Relationships Online

We just launched the killer local social app and I am about to bring my "network" of businesses online in a really meaningful "grow their business" way - as I move my blog over to Hubspot.

With this new app, we've served more than 15k page views in two weeks. It's bringing lots of local connections online. (I'm not linking to it until we've had 100k page views.)

Joshua Porter puts it eloquently when he says that online social networks are removing latency from our real world social networks by enabling the intrinsic benefit of reconnecting or making that connection visible to others.

What the big social network sites are doing is similar: they’re
creating a place where social standing, not economic standing, is the
primary motivation. Or, more to the point, they’re modeling that part
of our lives in which we yearn for social standing. As Danah Boyd and
Nicole Ellison rightfully articulate in Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship:

“What makes social network sites unique is not that they
allow individuals to meet strangers, but rather that they enable users
to articulate and make visible their social networks. This can result
in connections between individuals that would not otherwise be made,
but that is often not the goal, and these meetings are frequently
between “latent ties” (Haythornthwaite, 2005) who share some offline
connection. On many of the large SNSs, participants are not necessarily
“networking” or looking to meet new people; instead, they are primarily
communicating with people who are already a part of their extended
social network.”

In other words, you’re mostly dealing with people you already know in some way. The motivation is almost always intrinsic.

It's a simple benefit to the individual participants. But, it has the potential for both participant and platform creator - to reap huge rewards. The question Josh is asking, (later in his post) as Facebook begins to share this data with ecommerce companies, is "Who benefits more, is the benefit implicit and is that right?"

Our app is designed to benefit our participants more than us. Ultimately, I believe, that's where the value resides and the rewards belong.

If done right, the combination of internet network marketing and social media is a perfect attraction marketing strategy to establish your presence in a number of different places on the Web and reach potential customers anywhere in the world. Traditional marketing will never be able to target as precisely as social media marketing. Just imagine the social media profits you can have in being able to recruit people from different places. In terms of internet network marketing, social media channels offer many opportunities of earning your first one million dollars or more. Social media marketing can help you find free MLM leads, get guaranteed paid signups and build your downline via the people you invite to view your profile and become your friends.